Tag: Washington

Posted on

On Spring, Green and US Highway 95

Wednesday Betty and I drove from Boise to Moscow, Idaho, and Pullman, Washington, via US Highway 95. Well, not all the way; the first hundred or so miles we journeyed along Idaho Highway 55 through Horseshoe Bend, up the Payette River Canyon into the high long valley that runs through Cascade, Donnelly and McCall, Idaho before dropping down into New Meadows and Highway 95.

Payelle River Bridge

Springtime in Idaho is always my favorite time. Often tinted a dead brown, the state comes alive with multi-hued greens and the beginnings of wildflower season show up with yellows and reds and blues. The sky is enigmatic, often the most crystal shades of blue before turning sullen black with wide sprays of moisture falling like opaque shower curtains.

Wednesday was bright and blustery with scattered clouds scudding across the sky from northwest to southeast. In the high country the aspens looked as naked as they do in winter, but the wide variety of willows were an arresting shade of orange; and in the towns, the domestic trees shot shocking hints of chartreuse along the streets.

Cattle grazed on new grass. New grass always has a fresh look about it, as if it were gift-wrapped just to please the viewer. Alongside the cows, young calves romped; some black Angus, some Hereford, a lot of mixed breeds.
In the Salmon River country, the rivers ran manic, bouncing off the sun-swept rocks. The mountains dropped down like they wished to embrace us. Ospreys ruled the skies and made me think of catching salmon.

Above White Bird Hill, the land planed out, somewhat, and the vast fields that rolled away in all directions reminded me of some wild plaid of various shades of green, gold and brown. Strips of conifers grew in the harsh spots.

At Lapwai, an Appaloosa wore a hide that looked as if it had been painted by some master and reached his head over a barbed wire fence in search of tender morsels to chew on. The old sawmills sat vacant, their galvanized roofs undone and banging in the wind.

We wandered past the stinking paper mills at Lewiston, along the Clearwater River where Lewis and Clark wintered with the Nez Perce tribe in 1805 dining on salmon and various meals prepared from the native camas root that grows in the marshy prairies of the inland northwest.

Moscow, Idaho

Up another long grade from the river onto the Palouse and the rolling farmland sectioned into fields planted, waiting to be planted, and fallow, all different colors and in the slant of afternoon light seemed electric, as if created by mechanical tool instead of the play of light frequencies on sprouting wheat, newly plowed ground, and harrowed soil.

At Moscow we entered town and turned west towards Pullman and then settled in for the night.

Writing about spring and green and the newness of the season seems trite, hackneyed, clichéd, but we cannot defeat the march of seasons and so why not enjoy them and take their beauty, their hope for our own?

Posted on

On Man, Nature and Beauty

The weekend before last, Betty and I ate a sumptuous Sunday supper with our daughter and son-in-law, Sarah and Baruch Ellsworth, at The Corson Building in the Georgetown area of Seattle, Washington. After dining we headed back north to our lodging and noticed Mount Rainier, whose bottom was obscured by clouds that made the mountain look like it was suspended in a pink space, the pink coming from the setting sun illuminating the snow covered sides. The majesty of the instant reminded me of all those moments when nature sneaks up and surprises us with the magic of an unforeseen display.

Driving north we looked to the west and the peaks of the Olympic Peninsula jutted up like busted-off teeth, the recent snow only slightly more radiant than the mountain range’s rocky parts, all of it defined by the splayed light of the dying sun. A rose tint cast on the western sides of glassy skyscrapers. The thin clouds overhead captured their own pink tints, so that the night hung with a pregnant beauty created by a mix of season, sunset, snow, rock, and the steel and glass of tall buildings.

Since returning to our home in Boise, the mental image of all those pinks captured in both natural and manmade surfaces has set me to thinking on the nature of beauty in landscape.

I am a creature of the American West, having lived in desert, city, coastal and mountain environs, and have learned to appreciate what the land has to offer. Coastal rips of white and blue waves engulfing craggy rocks populated by black cormorants; fierce-toothed dust storms looming over spiny Sonoran desert mountain ranges; Rocky Mountain meadows and creek banks pocked with purples and reds and yellows of lupine and Indian paintbrush and cinquefoil; acres of high-basin barbwire and sagebrush dusted with an early morning snow; the lacy fingers of ice on the edge of a winter river. And not just nature, but also sunlight jigging in the windows of tall buildings, or the reflection of the spring-green hills in the glass of skyscrapers, the exquisite arc of a bridge over a foamy river…mixtures of man and nature’s creations that generate moments compelling one to mumble, “Aha.”

I suppose that those human/natural creations can be either serendipitous moments of sun and glass and cloud, or something envisioned by an architect or urban planner designing a building, a park, a bridge. Either way, there seems to be beauty in the meeting of land and man.

Granted, sometimes the meeting doesn’t result in something particularly grand, but in something heinous and ugly. I often recall moments of driving down boulevards of towns in the American West when the view of mountains, meadow or canyons has been blocked by cheap buildings, too many catty billboards, street lights, telephone lines, street signs all jumbled, with no thought given to how they may meet the human eye.

When we decide, as humans, to do it ugly, we do it well. Yet it’s not so simple as saying man only creates—through his bad behavior, his greed, his lack of foresight—things that are monstrosities to the eye and our sense of aesthetics. That would be too easy. Sometimes, I think, through his most catastrophic acts, man, in conjunction with nature, does create beauty.

Before I continue, don’t get me wrong, because I despise warfare on the most elemental levels. But as I sat trapped in the Siege of Khe Sanh, 1968, one of the things that rattled me the most was the stark and searing beauty created by war.
Bombarded trees shattered, their stripped limbs backlit by the early morning sun, or caught in stark white-barked contrast to the bomb and artillery shell-hole-pocked red mud landscape and the long spine of rugged jungle-tiered mountains in the distance. Those same tree limbs observed in juxtaposition to the hulls of blasted coffee-plantation houses, the roofs bashed in, the walls half gone, their surviving bricks delicately fingered out into the space left behind when incoming artillery killed all the life inside. Or the jumble of sea bags and ammo boxes with their weird geometrical scatter against the dull green of a shredded Marine Corps tent and the red dirt of the surrounding terrain. The abstract expression existing in the jumble of spent artillery casings and scraps of torn jungle dungarees, a collage it seemed; and a Guernica-like Picasso-esque helmet without a head, a boot close by, no foot inside. Beauty…our horrible beauty.